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A Colossus Mistake

April 19, 2007 8:52 pmApril 19, 2007 8:52 pm

In H Block at Bletchley Park, the historic code-breaking facility 50 miles from London, visitors can view a rebuilt working model of a Colossus, one of the first electronic digital computers, built during World War II to decrypt Nazi codes. If only they hadn’t waited 60 years to put it back together — there might still be a British Empire. And Silicon Valley might be in some bog outside of Bletchley Park.

During World War II, there were two major Allied efforts — one British and one American — to build electronic computers. The United States needed artillery-firing tables for their big-gun battleships. Until then, the word “computers” referred to people, mostly young women, who slowly fed error-filled information into number crunching machines. One such operation, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, was used to solve differential equations involving speed, wind, distance, etc., to improve accuracy. Over at the University of Pennsylvania, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, with help from the U.S. Army, were working on the design of the ENIAC, an electronic and programmable computer, to help automate and speed that task, and fire those human computers. The contract to build it was signed in 1943, but it was still being developed as the war dragged on. In the meantime, most artillery shells fired during the war simply missed.

The British had more pressing needs. They knew the Nazis were sending messages to troops and to U-boat submarines in code, using a code generating machine called Enigma. The Enigma had actually been used by Germany and other European countries since the 1920s. The Poles developed a model that successfully cracked the Enigma code in 1932. But by 1939, the Nazi’s had learned to change the critical key every day instead of every month. As Poland fell, the Poles smuggled their model, known as the Bomba, to the British, who set up a top-secret effort, ULTRA, at Hut 8 in Bletchley Park to decrypt the Enigma messages. Even with the help of the Polish Bomba it would take several days by hand to determine each day’s key.

Alan Turing, who conceptualized programmable computers at Princeton, was brought to Bletchley Park to design a machine called the Bombe out of electromechanical relays to automate this decryption task. Bombe was delivered in March of 1940 and by December of 1944, there were 192 Bombe machines, more calculator than computer, decrypting code. The Germans, by the way, also had a computer effort, led by Konrad Zuse, which was eventually destroyed by Allied bombing.

Hitler and his high command then developed a tougher code to communicate, named Lorenz (the Brits called it Tunny). An extra letter in its key made it much tougher to crack — it could take weeks to decipher the key instead of a day. In March of 1943, the brains at Hut 8 developed a programmable machine out of vacuum tubes to speed up breaking the Lorenz code. It was named Heath Robinson, after the British Rube Goldberg, as it was more of a contraption than a computer and didn’t help much.

Tommy Flowers and later Alan Coombs of, get this, the British Post Office, improved on the Robinson and by December of 1943, their aptly named room-sized Colossus computer was breaking the Lorenz code (or other codes as it was reprogrammable) in hours instead of weeks. The Colossus was the first real programmable computer; with 1500 vacuum tubes, it could read messages at 5000 characters per second and do 100 calculations at a time, all searching for patterns.

The Colossus played a crucial role in D-Day. By understanding where the Germans had the bulk of their troops, the Allies could decide which beaches to storm and what misinformation to spread to keep the landings a surprise.

The ENIAC, on the other hand, was no help in the shelling of German positions on D-Day. How do I know this? It wasn’t done yet. It wouldn’t be operational until February of 1946, fully two years after the British Colossus, and well after the war was over.

So why, one has to ask, is the computer industry so uniquely American? Why is the U.S. a superpower and the British lapdogs instead of bulldogs? At least in part, blame the Russians. Or British paranoia.

After VE day, the Cold War started immediately. The British were scared to death of Russian spies stealing the plans for the Colossus, of which 10 had been built. So they got rid of them. Yup, destroyed them — took an axe to the machines and lit a match to the plans. All the Bombes were destroyed, too. Can you believe it? Apparently, British Intelligence kept two Colossus machines for their own use (training Secret Agents 001 through 006, perhaps?). But these final two were destroyed the 1960s. It didn’t matter. Secrecy or paranoia, the general public didn’t learn about the Colossus machines until the 1970s. Now you know why there is no Sir Bill Gatesford, Duke of Bits.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the ENIAC was finally done and the War Department didn’t burn it. Instead, on February 16, 1946, it put out a press release and then held the first computer conference to explain how the ENIAC worked. Talk about open source! Every major corporation and university sent representatives, each of whom came back home and declared, “I gotta build me one of them things!”

And there you have it. The computer was born at Bletchley Park but the computer industry was born in the good old U.S. of A. Innovation ran rampant. In rapidly changing businesses, secrecy is not always the best policy. Silicon Valley popped up to supply cheap transistors for this uniquely domestic industry. Software grew. Today, companies make billions doing the same searches the Colossus “search engine” pioneered. The military even got their payback, eventually computer-guiding bombs via global positioning satellite coordinates instead of artillery firing tables. A trillion dollar press release!

Poor England. Technology today is a multi-trillion business dominated by American companies, thanks to simple British paranoia. Their century-long lead as an industrial power evaporated with nothing to replace it. A truly Colossus mistake! Let’s hope paranoia is not constraining the United States in the next wave of technology or potential wealth creation: offshoring, F.D.A. approvals, nuclear energy, stem cell research, bandwidth auctions, Area 51?

In another act of paranoid and even more dastardly lack of appreciation and forsight, England prosecuted Alan Turing on sodomy charges. They had him chemically castrated and took away his access to the computers. He was finally driven to suicide ony a few years after his major contributions to the war effort. What if such a fate had been visited upon the likes of the American innovators? Where would we be then …

Actually, our biggest innovation crisis right now is patent stupidity, especially for software and other algorithms.

Think of Amazon’s “one click” patent. If Amazon had copyrighted the javacsript (computer code) they used to make one-click online shopping possible, no problem. They’d have an exclusive on that code.

But instead, Amazon was granted a patent on the *idea* of one-click online shopping, which means no one else, no matter how brilliant, is allowed to develop ways to do the same thing better unless Amazon approves.

There are thousands of other examples of how software patents are killing innovation. One revolves around Microsoft, which is now using the threat of patent extortion (although the company refuses to say which of its thousands of patents are being infringed) to scare corporate IT buyers away from Linux.

We’re already starting to see a shift in software innovation to countries with less-silly patent policies.

Software “patent protection” is great for Microsoft, Amazon, and other behemoths, but it plays hell with the “two guys in a garage” startup efforts that are historically the biggest driving force in the software industry.

Neither Microsoft nor Amazon (along with many other big-time computer and Internet operations) would exist today if our current patent regime has been in place when they first got going.

If software had been patentable when Microsoft started, the company would almost certainly have been sued out of existence almost immediately by IBM, Sperry-Rand, and other then-dominant computer companies.

An interesting and informative article – written about matters WRT the Brits destroying Colossus and the subsequent rise of the computer industry in the US of A which I did not know about previously.

But, at the very end, I read the phrase “potential (future) wealth creation:OFFSHORING, etc., etc.”

So, the Brits were dumb and took an ax to Colossus, but WE are smart and are proceeding to take an ax to PEOPLE within the USA! Great news, indeed, to the Gordon Gecko’s of Wall Street, I am sure; much less so to the “consumers” in the US who will continue to see their material well-being sink continually.

I always think that young people born in the second half of the 20th Century should be cautious about criticizing the decisions made in and about World War II. It’s especially unfair to criticize the British who had fought two wars in one generation to combat despotism. Of course, mistakes were made. They always are, but the British weren’t even getting enough to eat to make good decisions in 1945. Give them a break.

The same thing is happening in copyright law. “Wicked” would not be possible if “The Wizard of Oz” would have been written 10 years ago instead of in 1900. Baum’s heirs would have complete artistic control of his work, mind boggling, no? Unfortunately, the average person (and I’m including our legislature) does not realize the stifling effect on creativity in all domains our current laws ensure. For an extensive review of the topic read Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture.”

The destruction of Colussus was one of a many decisions made in England that stifled innovation the Brits themselves had sought to, or had actually created.

One of the most monumental was in wireless communications.

British scientist Oliver Lodge began playing with Hertz waves that caused magnetic reactions in a tube across open space. Lodge called his version of this “trick” a “radio conductor” and he used it as a gimmick in speeches he gave to scientists around London. Meanwhile, In Italy, Guglielmo Marconi because messing around with Hertz waves, too.

Marconi persisted with his experiments and Lodge got into conducting seances. There is a very entertaining book that weaves a story out of all of this – Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson.

While the Lodge – Marconi fiasco was something I always found as a fantastic example of how stodgy British control-freakism and a false sense of superiority cost the Empire its position in the world, Larson’s book provided much more information into just how this kind of thinking most likely cut the Brits off from controlling the development of worldwide communications. A great read, that.

There are other examples of things the Brits developed that greatly advanced different areas of life. Read Dana Sobel’s great little book Longitude. The chronometer was perfected by a Brit.

Yet, when we think of the world’s great chronometers – we’re thinking Swiss, are we not?

It’s just that once they developed this all this stuff, in an effort to prevent the technology from falling into the wrong hands, they prevented themselves from advancing further with their own inventions via protectionism while the rest of the world caught up to and passed them by.

1. Re the bogosity of software patents, check out “Math You Can’t Use,” by Ben Klemens, published by Brookings Institution Press. It has been established that software is fundamentally equivalent to mathematics, and also that mathematics cannot be patented. Copyright is a perfectly adequate intellectual property mechanism for software. Nevertheless, USPTO routinely grants patents for software. There seems to be some movement to reform US patent procedures, but I have little optimism that this will be addressed.

2. Re US computer pioneers: check out Victor Atanasoff via your favorite search engine. You’ll be surprised, as the author of this article would be.

“Why were British engineers unable to produce computers commercially?” “Because they couldn’t figure out a way to make them leak oil.” (Heard 25 years ago, from the mouth of a Stanfordite who went on to found a multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley start-up; presumably with reference to the Jaguar, et. al.)

There is more to the story about the persecution of Alan Turing and the suppression of the story of British code-breaking computers.

The allies had captured any number of Nazi Enegma machines by war’s end. The British Foreign Office, realizing that many colonies would soon become independent, came up with the idea of giving away “unbreakable” code machines to the new governments. Now the Brits could read the secret diplomatic messages of their new allies. (Shades of perfidious Albion).

To keep the scam going, the code-breaking had to stay secret. Not only were the machines kept secret, but anyone aware of them, especially their inventor, needed a security clearance.

While British concern about the security risks of homosexuality may seem prescient in the light of the Cambridge Five (Kim Philby & Co.), it was probably simple prejudice.

At any rate, Turing was driven to suicide by the nation he saved and the advanced British computer designs were kept from British companies and universities seeking to develop commercial and scientific computers.

What more the British Foreign Office learned from Enigma decrypts that they couldn’t have gotten with old-fashioned bribery, we’ll never know.

This article seems to provide an insight into the reasons that the British yielded their lead(paranoia) in computers to the USA(openess/sharing ENIAC with the masses). The article, however, begs the question – “Why Stanford/Palo Alto and not Philadelphia/PENN, the birthplace of ENIAC, is home to Silicon Valley.”

Before jumping on this being one more thing the Brits got wrong, imagine the American project had also been for cracking codes, and had proved so very useful. Would they have given it away?

Not likely. They held onto the Manhattan project’s nuclear secrets as tightly as they could, and nuclear power probably had more obvious civilain usefulness than did computing.

It’s a crying shame, nontheless. As is the story of Turing’s persecution. (These days that side of the Atlantic has outgrown its homophobia.) You’d think that 5 years or so after the American project was public they might have reconsidered, and released the machine if not the code-breaking details, or something.

Jazzy writing full of errors of fact. While Turing spent a small bit of time at Princeton, his major acomplishment was publishing while at Cambridge, UK. During the last year of the war, the Navy was using gunnery tables from the Mark I working at Harvard in 1944, a programable computer, but electro mechanical, and not binary! I believe information about the ‘Colossus’ was delayed by the secretes act until nearly 1990, when finally Tommy Flowers, also in his 90’s could be recognized for his efforts. The fear of Russia learning of UK code breaking was real, and US friendship initially with Stalin influenced Churchil. The first international computer conference was sponsored by the Navy Dept. bureau of Ordnance at Harvard 1947, January, and Turing was amoung the participants. The fact that our universities and industries were not decimated by war was a significant enhancement of our position. The influence and theoretical work of John vonNeuman was a vital resource as well. A fun read needs better foundations. No wonder the public fails to understand science, the reporter fails to understand.

Give the British a break! Thank you Georgia McDaniel. Without the British intelligence service, the 19 and 20 year old fighter pilots who won the Battle of Britain and yes their national back bone, we might all be speaking German.

I agree wholeheartedly with the premise and basic thrust of your article. Now that there are discussions about patenting genes, how far off can be be from the lampooning Onion article whose title claims “Bill Gates Patents Ones, Zeroes!”